It’s a useful exercise to take the things people say about one gender and try flipping them to the other. I’m sorry to say that all of the arguments the ladies are making fun of above are things I’ve seen people actually say in response to the controversy over the paucity of female characters in Warlords of Draenor. I wonder what they would say to the gender-reversed versions of their own arguments.

It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen the completed expansion so we don’t yet know what kind of representation female characters will actually have. Blizzard has a decent track record of making interesting female characters, both minor characters and major plot drivers. We can live in hope that despite the wibbly-wobbly blast-from-the-hypermasculine-past nature of the expansion there will be room for more good female character development. The thing is: we shouldn’t have to live in hope. In this day and age when the representation of women in gaming is such a public cause, it was startlingly tone-deaf of Blizzard not to pay more attention to the issue in how they rolled out the new expansion at Blizzcon. Calling the new expansion a “boys’ trip” may just be Metzen being Metzen, but it also betrays a real failure to think about how Blizzard’s presentation of itself and its games comes across to half the player base. (Sadly, not a first for Metzen.)

By the time you see this comic, Blizzcon may well have come and gone and we’ll know whether our panda-shaped hopes for the next expansion will soar over the skies of mist-shrouded islands or be crushed under the steel-plated boots of Blizzard development.

As delightful as I find the pandaren, I won’t be too upset if we don’t get them as a playable race. I don’t know if I could handle the cognitive dissonance of having an adorable, big-eyed panda person gank my lowbie alt, teabag my corpse, and call me an anal n00b. At least crazy cursed wolf-men and conniving goblins were believable being the kind of jerks that we all know players can be. If I have to get used to my fellow players being pandaren, too, it’ll take some adjustment.